


Bluebeard's Crown

by prodigy



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Casual Bisexuality, Doomed Relationships, F/M, Faerie Bargain, Flashbacks, Gen, Immortals Struggling With Mortality, M/M, Mayfly-December Romance, Multi, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:15:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29553399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: InBlood of Years and Yearlings, Grima Mog wrote an afterthought too:The real weakness of our people, which I cannot quite name either a flaw or a vice, is that we are always slaying our own kind.After the end, Madoc makes a bargain that requires him to go back to the beginning. But the ghosts of Eva and Justin Duarte don't prove so easy to exorcise.
Relationships: Eva Duarte/Justin Duarte, Eva Duarte/Madoc, Justin Duarte/Madoc
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2021





	Bluebeard's Crown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phlyarologist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/gifts).



The mortal witch Madoc goes to see is fearful to see him. This doesn't offend him, as it is a common state of affairs and hardly unreasonable. She comes out of her little cottage, shaped like an off-center bell, in time to watch him dismount swiftly; she looks at his features, his bloodied cap, and the sweep of his finely worked cloak, and purses her lips--either surmising who he is, or displeased with the sum of it anyway.

But when he ties up his horse and bows to her and comes towards her without drawing on her, she eases. Grand General Madoc is a straightforward person, it is generally said. If he wants to kill you, he will take his sword out and come over and kill you. Of course, now Grand General Madoc is a traitor a few times over, but in spite of this most agree that the central truth remains.

There's a mummers' skit about it now. Madoc hasn't seen it but he does agree that it sounds accurate, in sort of a secondhand way. And there are worse things to be known for.

"Grand General," says the witch, tilting her little chin down a fraction. She is wary, through her pale, near-translucent eyelashes. "I was not expecting your visit. What brings you here?"

The Folk are often astonishing, it is said, and sometimes ugly: never middling, never unmemorable. Madoc is ugly. He disagrees that the other Folk are astonishing, or devastating, or even memorable. They are a pretty and youthful people, but he's seldom astonished by meeting one.

This human woman, he admits, is a bit lovely. A little lovelier than Oriana; not beautiful, like his daughters; not arresting, like Eva or Justin; but she has enormous teardrop eyes that put him in mind of a dragonfly, and he is in a mood to think sentimentally of fragile things.

"I am here to extinguish a desire that I have," he says with a smile. "And I hope to fulfill a few others. Have I come to the correct place?"

"I don't know, General. I don't know what your desire is. Please do come in, however."

Her name is Aenora. She is properly a weaver, but by the state of her house it's been a rather long time since she's been to market with any sort of textile; and in spite of the sweet girlishness of her face, she is very old. Older than him, by far. Only her fragile spun-sugar hair is any tell of it. She sits him down across from her loom and bids him explain.

He clears his throat, and so feels the palpable thickness of his own unease. It isn't self-protective, or not of his life. He trusts Aenora about as well as anyone trusts a stranger on first meeting, in a cottage or at a Court. Yet he feels an uncommon disjoint between what he wants and how he wants it.

He wants what he's come for, with searing urgency. But he doesn't want to be here. He wants the end of his eventual journey with a familiar intensity: desire is a demanding feeling. But he also finds the image of walking out this door again, on a manufactured pretext, to be attractive. There is a split.

"I tend to want a lot of things," he deflects, admits, with an offhand smile. (The word is _stalls_ , he is aware.)

"So we've all been hearing. What specifically now?"

Madoc shrugs. "There's a particular matter I'm pursuing, but before that: I'd like to bring my first wife and my daughter Jude back to the land of the living. I miss them and I intend to have them back with me."

"Mad, sentimental, and impossible," says an unblinking Aenora.

"Yes, I thought you might say that. Well, I will go to someone else about that one. What I've come to you for, however--" Madoc leans forward without quite realizing, and sees the witch flicker with doubt; he marshals the space he occupies tightly for reasons like this. No one likes to see a man with a red cap moving towards them unexpectedly. Aenora's flinch reminds him of why; he feels a faint thrum of interest, not in her teardrop eyes this time, but the way he imagines a fox reacts to the hop of a rabbit.

He's used to it. He lets it pass. "I would like to be rid of my bloodlust. The feeling within myself. I would part with it. I've been told that you will draw things like that out of a man, for your materials."

That seems, genuinely, to surprise her. She assesses him with new eyes, narrowed to a different expression. "That is an unusual request for a man of your kind," she observes, in a tone that indicates that she well knows that the observation is an obvious one. "Newly a conqueror, Grand General. And yet you would lay down your arms forever?"

"Oh, no. Nothing like that." Madoc shakes his head definitively. "I have every intention of remaining in my post; I want my _bloodlust_ gone. I shall never give up making war, Aenora--I cannot even imagine."

"Very well." The witch has gone from scrutinizing him to contemplating him: a matter of intensity. Like a river's bed becoming wide. "This I can offer you. But it is a curious request. You'd like your hunger for killing to be gone--but you still desire to kill. So they are different things?"

Madoc smiles. "Am I a beast, Aenora?"

She says nothing. Not pointedly--just casts her eyes down to her own human hands.

"I believe I can do this for you," she states again. "In exchange you must tell me why."

Aenora the weaver must truly have been in Elfhame for a very long time: it is a faerie's bargain she strikes. Madoc is equal to it. "I am not usually a storyteller," he warns her in advance of his own ramblings; and yet, as he thinks through the beginning of his tale, he realizes he is not sure of the truth of where to begin.

* * *

In his life, Madoc had long been at-home with wanting what was out of his reach. It's something of a redcap vice. Grima Mog herself said it well and slyly in her narrative _Blood of Years and Yearlings_ , which she penned in her famous campaign with mortals in the mortal world: _our people have many faults and few vices. One is that we are irresistibly drawn to new things, like moths; we are never satisfied. But another that arises is that we love the unconquerable. We desire what cannot be ours. This is what it means to be always on campaign, after all. The secondary reputation is that it makes us fools for something, every one._

He read this long ago. He'd thought he'd seen the truth within it, shrugged it off; it was philosophical, but when it came to it he thought the reason he most liked things out of his reach was that most were. It became a place of comfort: dreaming of what he couldn't gain by force alone. Complacency, even--for why try to attain what he could idly covet?

Such was his first, stupid notion of Justin Duarte the smith.

Madoc considered himself ugly because enough people had done the considering for him over time. It was the sort of thing he was ready to accept consensus on. At the same time, they did sometimes find him appealing. --Not all of them. He always carried himself in the best way that he knew how: with the confidence of tightly sealed aggression, of a conflagration that only knew how to grow. With sureness and hunger--which were things that outdid ugliness, from time to time. He had his sport.

But he didn't stop to watch Justin at his Insmire forge because he had sport in mind. Not at first. He stopped to watch him because his equipment was interesting.

On certain pieces Justin worked wearing in a combination of enchantment and practical, physical armament; today, Madoc's first real sight of him, he was girdled with three bands of leather inscribed with letters that glowed every time he struck metal. Beneath these he sported a thick apron, gloves that extended past his elbows, and a mirrored visor that reflected the forge and fire in perfect detail-- and along its edge, Madoc in the doorway.

Beneath all this he could've been anyone: mortal or faerie, thick or thin, beautiful, ugly, plain. He worked with decisive grace. Madoc watched him.

Justin ignored him until he was done with his hot working--then, cleaning up his tools, he pushed his visor up and unbuckled it from his head, shed his gloves, and turned to Madoc a shockingly handsome mortal man. What always struck Madoc about humans was their youth--youth was so frail a flower, and age so sudden and punishing, that for a mortal to come to Elfhame was usually to be arrested in their youngest and hottest-blooded days. For many who remained there, that became an illusion. But Justin Duarte really was young.

Young and proud. He looked steadily at Madoc. "I am sorry, General," he said with the straightforward insincerity of a mortal. "Smithing is a thing sensitive to the moment. I cannot address a visitor in the middle of it. --I hope you enjoyed your show."

"I did," said Madoc, showing a complement of teeth. He knew how he came off, but that was no reason not to smile. He had no expectation of befriending this man. But he would enjoy the sight of his craft, and his form.

Then Justin Duarte startled him by grinning back. He had straight teeth of his own and dimples, which punctuated it.

"Good. I would hate to displease a patron, present or future. --In truth I've been wondering if you would come by. You are the only possible appreciator of my work at this Court. It would have been a shame never to meet you."

Madoc's eyebrows hitched. Justin watched him with interest, clearly fascinated by his eyes; mortals often were. The blaze of the forge was bright: his pupils were narrow, accordingly. Humans sometimes found this threatening or seductive, rather than subject to optics, as it was. Justin just looked amused. Madoc dismissed this with a shake of his head, and said, "They've never said that the great swordsmith is a flatterer."

"You _are_ , though. The only man I'd expect to appreciate what I do. It is not my fault, and only my good fortune, if the truth is also what you most desire to hear," said Justin Duarte; and with a motion with a rag, a broad smudge came away from his nose and cheek. "Now, General, is there something I can do for you?"

In _Blood of Years and Yearlings_ , Grima Mog wrote an afterthought too: _(The real weakness of our people, which I cannot quite name either a flaw or a vice, is that we are always slaying our own kind.)_

* * *

Here Aenora interjects. She listens well--presumably because she is in the business of harvesting life stories--and also comments without shyness. "Justin Duarte the swordsmith was your lover?"

"Not at this point," says Madoc with a shake of his head. "In fact I barely knew him then. --This isn't chiefly about Justin. Nor Eva. But I could hardly omit them."

"You didn't mention him in your litany of the dead--well, those into whom you have the fool intention of breathing life," she observes.

Madoc hesitates.

"I don't think he would come at my calling," he says. "Not now. I've both destroyed his life and ended it. Eva was my wife. Jude--"

The present tense leaps into his mouth. But it goes no further, because he remembers it's wrong, which makes it a lie.

"Eva and Jude are my family. I have no claim on Justin, in the undiscovered country or any other."

"And have your wife and daughter ever honored your claims before?"

When he doesn't answer, just sits straight-backed in his chair, she sighs. Silence is a damning answer for a faerie. It is the last resort for their dignity. She permits him his on this point, at least, and reaches for a spindle. "I did not mean to interrupt, Grand General. I appreciate the honor as well as the novelty of your company. What is this chiefly about, then?"

"Your condition for our bargain," says Madoc. "You asked me 'why.' I am trying to answer."

He watches Aenora with her spindle, untwisting red yarn with a bruiselike undertone. Elfhame is full of magics he'll never live to comprehend; he is more curious than he lets on. It's more that he always comes with a purpose, which is rarely the idle pursuit of information. Her fingers work with the busy thrum of habit.

He concedes, a moment later: "--It's about myself."

"You're the one telling it," says Aenora, not without sympathy. "You can hardly help it."

* * *

He commissioned a sword from Justin that year. Justin prised from him a bargain (a forge, more finely and deliberately built, on Madoc's own land) and a few things about himself, not secrets but stories he was surprised to hear anyone heard the telling of; and Justin forged for him a blade. First he asked: "Hot or cold?"

"What?" The question didn't follow naturally in the conversation and Madoc was off his guard.

"A sword develops its own character. So I can't promise you anything in particular about the details: but I can at least start with a foundation. Would you like it to be hot or cold in nature?"

Madoc stared at Justin; at his hair, which spiraled into an untidy braid; at his body, which could only be seen directly through panels set into his clothing, shamelessly sheer on him; and at the polite and entirely solicitous expression on his face. Just a month previous Madoc had been direct with him, as he preferred to be: _Will you go to bed with me? You are handsome and talented beyond measure. I admit I am an aggressive lover; my temperament is a dominant one. But I am not so brutal as you might think._

 _You are a client,_ had been Justin's unreadable reply.

He still had the habit of biting his bottom lip when he was thinking on one of Madoc's questions.

"Cold," said Madoc.

Justin worked for a fortnight; at the end of it, he presented him with a sheathed sword. "This is Nightfell," he said. "She will never feel like your sworn knight or your bride. But she'll not break your heart."

Mortals could lie; anyone could be wrong.

Justin got his forge, his promises, his answers. Of answers himself, he only gave a few. "Duarte is a Portuguese name," he said. "Most of my family is from Brazil, where that's the language they speak. --Many of you don't have family names. Is that because you live so very long and have so few children? Our names exist, technically, to remember our ancestors. ... Now, I suppose, to write down on forms."

"We still have ancestors," said Madoc with a shrug. "I just have no interest in mine. I do not even know who my father was."

He didn't. His mother had bedded different men at the time of his conception, and none of them had been interesting enough for her to track down. He was proud of her alone, uninterested in adding to it: proud of what she raised him to, and of the end she met. This was at the hands of the son of a woman she'd slain in anger. The boy, grown, had come seeking justice; but he'd come when she was already sick with a wound from a different battle. Madoc had asked if honor would let her delay. Instead she had him bind the dressing tight. _Come and see how a soldier dies_ , she'd told him. He was thirteen. _Remember it gladly._

* * *

"Your daughter Vivienne. Your eldest." Aenora, unexpectedly, knows her name. Perhaps she knows all their names: perhaps she knows this entire story, and is merely interested to hear what he'd say of it. It's no matter--it is the bargain. "Does she recognize you as her father? Or is her father still this man, to her?"

"Both. Neither. I would say that Justin will forever be her father. But that she's also resigned to me. Not just as a presence. I don't think she would renounce me if I was dead. --Kill me, yes. Renounce me, no."

"Is that because of her nature," Aenora peers at him over the spindle, which she has now almost fully unwound, "sharing an inheritance with yours?"

"Vivienne? Oh, no." Madoc half-smiles. It's on his lips, anyway, but not his eyes. "Jude was the most like me. Vivienne is like Eva."

* * *

There was a superstition, not-unfounded, that a faerie could be kept at standstill if you bound him in a circle of salt. Now, faeries were not quite so squeamish--certainly Madoc wasn't--and the tale expanded and then exploded; some times he overheard in the mortal world that he could be bound in a circle of saltwater. In a circle of anything. Just a ring, drawn around him in the dirt or the sand. What a way to live--who could envision it?

He could. Only now. An instant ago in Madoc's life, Eva Nowak was born; and an instant later than that, he met her, and Eva bent and traced something around his feet, in the dust of his deathless life, and he was bound. He was bound.

He had come into the habit of coming to the mortal world for sport, for merriment, to ease his boredom; and because he had begun to feel something akin to an itch. It wasn't an itch properly. It was on the wrong sense. But he didn't know what sense it was: and it put him in restless moods, where he would make a steed for himself from ragwort bloom and take himself to the world of iron.

That quality did have its own allure. In a certain temper, he liked the smell of a place with no hospitality for him--clouded with poison, which he could scent on the air when he let the ragwort wither. Strangers were rude and innocent, with no agenda or eye to anything. Their food was cheap and rich. And death was everywhere, for him and for everyone else. The city reeked. He loved it when it didn't repulse him.

\--and he did blame Justin for the itch, too. Not merely for denying him what he wanted, for Madoc _was_ fearsome, and even the great and gallant Prince Dain Greenbriar had once agreed, pitying: _What a bridegroom you would make, Grand General. Nevertheless every man ought to have the chance for a home, and for sweet company in his bed every night, if he so desires it._

 _Almost everything I desire is within my reach_ , Madoc had headed off this particular humiliation, _and if it isn't, then I rarely desire it. I like the elusive, Your Highness. I have less interest in the impossible._

Now Justin Duarte had made a liar of him, for what he wanted did not only elude him, but pricked him with the needles of a hundred other unsatisfiable needs. And so he intermittently came to the mortal world, and seduced mortal men and women, and fought his kind and humankind when they challenged him--and found other thrills besides.

Madoc met Eva Nowak in the city of Chicago, far inland on the shore of a great frozen lake. In the dead of winter the place was near uninhabitable; Madoc, born in a colder land, didn't mind it, though often thought it could use fewer revolving doors. He was looking for a sorceress whose name he knew, but he admittedly wasn't looking very hard; Eva had come from a club or a cocktail bar, wearing a red dress of a very twentieth-century style and a mink coat of a more timeless quality. Even before the wind buffeted her she was closing the coat around herself, fastening it and pulling it all around her--but he had a glimpse of the rounded edges of her figure, her full breasts and the sturdy shape of her neck before she covered up everything but her architecturally made face. Her lipstick was red.

He was interested, but not in a conscious way. The level of glamour he bothered with was low: a complicated illusion didn't seem worth the trouble. People could see what they intended to see, an impression that wasn't a lie per se--he was tall, fair-haired, broadly and powerfully built. Not a delicate man. Women like this would pass him by.

She tarried on her way out, though, which was odd--humans were very mindful of the cold. Instead she shivered and shuffled up next to an entry that blocked the wind a bit, in her coat. She produced her gloves, but before she pushed her fingers into them, she found a pack of cigarettes. Eva was not a delicate woman herself: or at least that wasn't the term Madoc would have applied to her. But her hands did tremble with the cold, trying to light it.

Madoc silently offered her a light, out of pure goodwill. She looked at him warily--he didn't retract the offer, didn't have the socialization to even consider it. A moment later she did take it, and managed to get a little flame going on her cigarette by sheltering it from the wind.

"Thank you," she said. "You're more helpful than your brothers. But I'm still not going to give you anything in return."

"My brothers?" He was startled, of course.

"A figure of speech. I suppose you aren't all related," she said, coolly. The hand she cupped around the ember still protected it. She took a drag. "Well, everything is related at the bottom of it. But I meant--you're one of them, I can tell. --It's all right. I'm not afraid."

Mortals lied. Madoc couldn't tell whether she was. She looked up at him, eyes dark, lashes thick with mascara applied before an event of some kind gone sour. He never would learn what it was. It struck him that the way she'd said it sounded more like, _don't be afraid_. Like she'd found him in a clearing.

He had the reflex to say something to allay that. He realized that he could not.

"I am," he said. "My name is Madoc. I am one of the Folk of the Air. But I grow restless sometimes and roam. --I did not come here to trick you or trap you or otherwise interfere with you. But I am a danger to you all the same. You wouldn't be wrong to be afraid."

Eva smiled, small and contained, but he had the impression it was a fraction of a wilder and more macabre smile that she'd disciplined. "But you smoke cigarettes?"

"Just cloves," he admitted. "When I'm here. It's not terribly responsible to the capacity of my lungs. But it guises the smell of blood."

Eva breathed in, deeply--first her smoke, and then the air outside of it, between them. "Are you a cannibal?" she said. "A cellar in your castle, like Bluebeard?"

"Oh, no." Madoc considered his explanation. "Though there are Folk like what you describe. I am a soldier. I live for victory and the spilling of blood. So it follows me wherever I go, no matter how long it's been."

"Oh, we have people like you here too." She arched a quizzical eyebrow--a little flirtatious, maybe, but also undeniably skeptical. "I think the common consensus is that they've ruined absolutely everything."

"I'm sure they have. Though you do not have people like me here," said Madoc with an unrestrained smile.

Eva Nowak put the cigarette between her lips and contemplated him. The cold had brought vivid color into her cheeks, even under the night's makeup. If she were out here too long in the windchill, it would take the color out of them, too. She watched him watching her, with that skepticism still in her eyes. It came to him that there was an undercurrent of fear to her after all. But it wasn't the fear that he would harm her. It was the fear that she would be played for a different kind of fool, that he would not turn out to be real.

* * *

She gave him a tour of the winter city. The buildings interested him, which seemed to surprise her; when she pointed out Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, she took note enough of his expression to say, "I didn't really expect you to care about the details."

"The world is all details. Any world--yours or mine. It takes confusion to render it a lovely blur. I prefer to get my bearings."

She bought him hot apple cider from a stand that was still open, and one for herself as well. "This is a gift," she specified with the endearing suspiciousness of a human who wasn't sure yet what might incur a debt. He thanked her and drank down the hot spiced liquid, first quickly and then, after her example, more slowly; the heat didn't bother him, but he could tell he was making a strange sight. It wasn't the sight that convinced him, anyway--it was the relish she took in the beverage.

"Is this your favorite drink?" he asked her, curiously.

She peered at him. "Apple cider? Oh, no. ... Christ, what _would_ that be. Nonalcoholic. You know, I think it's probably limeade. Like a cherry limeade. -- _God_. Wrong season, though. But hell if this won't do, right?"

She knocked it back. He fell in love.

Before they walked back to the L train, he asked if he could see her again. The question seemed to impress upon her his seriousness, and she was more awkward than before: including when he asked her name above the steps to the train, and she said, "I don't want you to trick or glamour or command me. The reason I know about you is because I've seen it done before."

"Upon my blood I swear that I will not trick, glamour, or command you. I have no desire from you that does not involve your willing interest. ... But I also have no way of looking you up, without a name or a phone number."

She grinned, with just a hint of mischief; and she told him.

"Like with the apple," said Madoc, pleased.

"Yes. Buyer beware. I warn you, I'm not so dolled up most of the time," said Eva.

* * *

When he came back to Insmire and his house, he found most of the lights snuffed and the warmest glow coming from Justin's new forge, a short walk from Madoc's garden. Madoc made it in his boots, conscious of a weariness in his limbs that had set in suddenly, from spending such a time in the world of iron and death without any remedies against it. Oddly enough, it made him feel satisfied; no going to bed tonight with a pent-up itching need within him for sex or bloodshed or one of their many substitutes. He felt ready to settle down, like he'd given something his all.

Justin, admittedly, challenged this settled feeling. He wasn't forging something, but sharpening a tool, a task that made an ugly sound but a seductive motion; he didn't hear Madoc at all, and only spied him when he turned and saw him in the door. He startled like an animal and Madoc suppressed an urge.

It was Madoc's recent observation that the persona Justin Duarte presented to the faerie court was not quite the person he was when left alone. Yes, he _was_ cocksure: but he turned that face of himself towards the nobility of Elfhame for a reason. He wished to be seen as a craftsman, not a resource--to be traded with, not taken or exploited. Madoc did understand.

Justin had lean, tightly muscular arms, and interesting tattoos on them. Not magical: mortal art. Madoc liked to see them in motion. "My most generous patron," Justin said with some reserve. "I did not know you were away from your estate."

"I was in your world. I met a woman. I'm afraid that I'm in love with her now."

Later, Madoc would become aware that this was a completely absurd thing to say in mortal company. A cultural difference. Justin was accustomed to the Folk, however, and merely laid his tools down and crossed his arms: like it would guard his own heart from that kind of vulgar trespass. "Well, you're in a bind," he said plainly.

Madoc gave a shocked and bright laugh; then laughed again at Justin's expression. "No, no. You're right, I am."

"What are you waiting for?"

"Pardon me?"

"I said, Grand General: what are you waiting for? You should pursue her if you're so intent." Justin had a strange expression, one that Madoc might have turned about in his head later if he were a bit more pensive, and heat were not building, slow, in the pit of his stomach and the base of his spine. "She's mortal. Not like me, but there. Blink and she'll be old. Blink again and she'll be dead. --It isn't good to make humans wait. Only this place is the Summer Country." Justin drew closer whenever he spoke to his own fire, perhaps to warm himself against the cold. His arms were bare, after all. "Out there, we rot on the vine."

Madoc closed the distance between them with three steps. Justin's eyes were half-lidded; beneath his eyelashes, his pupils were black and wide. His breathing had an uncertain falter to it that Madoc knew for feigned uncertainty, for someone trying to disguise the pace of his breath and the beat of his heart. Madoc could hear it. This was what they brought humans to Elfhame for--the inspiration they brought to craft. The urgency of their lives. The hammering of their rabbit hearts.

"Thank you," said Madoc, genuinely. "I will." He tilted Justin's chin up with his hand and gave in.

* * *

"Is that what you bring us to Elfhame for?" says Aenora the weaver, distractedly.

Madoc's reverie has distracted him too, but from his physical surroundings. Usually when he reminisces, he does it by himself. He has a sharp memory. It allows him to relive dead things as he pleases. So it is a little bit strange, it occurs to him, that he doesn't reminisce very often. That when he thinks of Eva or Justin, the first thing he thinks of is a light, bright and uncomfortable to look at, in place of their presence. Something that nudges him to sidestep looking at them directly, and to focus on their hands, on what else was in the room. He has to remind himself to color them in.

"Mortals? Yes. You are more alluring than we are and more distinct. My wife Oriana is dear to me now; but I hardly think she is first in any man's heart."

He could be wrong, he supposes. His daughters have all renounced him. His son might, or perhaps will inevitably. There's nothing keeping a better man from climbing to Oriana's window, stealing her heart, and planting a seed against him.

"I've heard different reasons." Aenora regarded him. "Something about our will being easy to dominate."

"Well, _that_ isn't true," says Madoc with remembered affection that makes Aenora roll her eyes.

She considers. "Well. I was taken in the year of our Lord 1146, if you would believe it... as little more than a nasty trick. Exchanged for another. How did Justin Duarte come here?"

"He was stolen to Insweal as a child. For his looks. It was thought he would grow up to be handsome... and he did, but before that he was sold off to Grimsen for an apprentice, to pay a debt. --His mother came and rescued him within a year. She came away successful. But I suppose it was no good, was it?" Madoc frowns. "He wasn't sixteen before he made his way back."

"And Eva?"

"No one has ever managed to steal Eva," says Madoc, flatly. As if that puts an end to something.

* * *

His courtship of Eva proceeded from fortnight to fortnight with a knock every time on her door. She lived in a row house with a little iron gate that was always open, which felt like a sentry watching him and pricking him with a blade as he walked through. The first time he came to call on her, he wore a frock coat which he thought was ordinary, and which she laughingly informed him was not; and in truth, he hadn't come hoping to court her. He came hungry, hopeful of taking her away with him and taking her to bed, or at least the latter.

She answered the door without makeup, with the curls falling loose in her long brown hair and the undone top button of a blouse visible underneath her bathrobe. Her eyes went wide, with surprise and some other emotion. He would never learn what it was.

"So you are real," she said after a few moments.

"As real as you are," Madoc said, smiling. He found it difficult to be at ease with Eva, at least for now. Her startled moments were of use to him there.

"What have you come here for?"

Madoc reached into the pocket of his coat. "To see you again and win your heart. I've fallen in love with you in a terrible way, and I'm not one to forget about something like that for very long."

"That's completely insane," said Eva Nowak, as Justin Duarte had not in fact conveyed a sensible warning about this subject to Madoc.

"No, it isn't. Do you think you're not someone other people would fall in love with?"

Eva stood in the doorway still, arms bundled around herself in a way that reminded him of Justin, in fact, but more openly wary. More than wary, astonished. "You're completely insane," she elaborated after a little thought.

"I'd hardly be the highest authority on that, would I?" Madoc grinned. He was told usually that he had a menacing grin, but the sudden brashness of it in fact drew a reluctant smile out of Eva too. "Here. I have a gift for you. Freely given, with nothing expected in return--though a few hopes, I'll admit." He drew out the small wooden box and handed it over; after a moment's hesitation she took it, soft fingers brushing his. She opened it, and he said: "Those are charms of rowan. Ankle, throat, and wrist. Wear any of them and neither I nor any of the Folk have any power over you."

Eva drew out the bracelet first and, before saying anything else, pushed her hand through it. Her nails had been painted recently--dark blue, with a swirl of glitter--and were starting to chip. She looked at him, uncertainly; she pushed her dark hair back and bared her neck, which he watched unabashed, and fastened the necklace. The anklet went into her pocket.

She studied him. He wondered what she was weighing, or if she was weighing it at all--if she was considering, or just looking. Her cheeks were tinged: not the cold red of powder, but a blush, the real kind. He thought he could hear the beat of her heart.

"You can come in as a friend and a caller today," she said. "You will leave when I ask you to leave. Come in, Madoc."

She did not let him undo the buttons of her blouse. She did sit him down at the kitchen table and feed him part of a breakfast casserole. This was extremely delicious, and when he said so, she said: "Thank you--have you eaten anything today?" And upon learning not: " _Why_? You know, the city has a lot of things worth eating--"

"Oh, no, I know. I was thinking about an Italian beef before." Eva's reaction amused him; he raised his eyebrows and said, "I _have_ been here before. But no, I was too impatient for the line."

She laughed over this piece of shared human-faerie experience and sat down with him. She was interested to hear of his travels in the mortal world--not just because it was unusual for him to be doing it, but because the world interested her in general. He'd been to pieces of it that she hadn't. Not that he'd been to all other lands, either: at his saying this, she looked at him curiously and asked why that was.

The answer he gave: "The mortal world is all together in one place. On this planet and away from it, I assume--contiguous. Or that's how that appears."

"Mm. Debatable, depending on what physicist you ask, I hear."

* * *

Here in his tale Aenora takes down a long wooden needle and holds it out to Madoc. He takes it from her, curious, but she proffers no explanation for the time being.

Instead she says, "I hear of many things from the mortal Earth. Though I suppose that's the wrong word, isn't it? My world was old and constant, and must be still. Our lives are the brief ones. --And your lives are long. It's your lands that are born and rise and sink into the sea."

"Have you never been back?" The wooden needle is smooth, sanded to a finish and crudely worked. He might've felt a similar object at a craft fair in a London or a Brighton or a Copenhagen, one of those two-day events in the industrial world where where people pay handsomely to hold a craftsman's work in their hands, every so often. It spurs him to speak of it, though it takes him off his story again--"Swathes of the mortal world have abandoned the work of experts. Instead most things are made by machine. The success of the machine's owner comes from the transaction, not the thing being made: so they make them badly, so they can make them again and again. They live on unnecessary commerce. Do you not think it strange?"

"I do," says Aenora. "And yet I believe that you're stalling."

"Stalling?" Madoc's voice has genuine surprise in it. "It's not my practice to do things like that."

"It is the practice of all the Fair Folk, Grand General. At least in my experience. I will give you the distinction of being less prone to it than some others. And yet more than some." She seems amused to have incited a spark of actual indignation in him, and with this new liveliness in her, gestures to the needle. "With this I'll make what I need to grant your request. This, and one thing from you."

Madoc inspects the needle, wondering if he's to slam his palm down so it spears his hand through or something like. It sounds incredibly unpleasant, but it's far less than he'd do for what he's come for.

"You have violence in your eyes again. I only require a little. Prick your finger on the tip, if you would; and let it bleed. When the blood stops we'll know you've reached the end of what you need to tell me."

His eyes flicker to hers, just briefly. A tale is one thing, but blood is another. If Aenora is playing him false, it is here where she will exact the cost for it. But he doesn't think so. Not from the beginning, or he wouldn't have come; and not now, where she meets his gaze steadily with those dragonfly eyes.

She is desirable too, in her way. It _is_ the reason his kind take hers from the course of their lives, and tangle them all around their own. One way or another. But she's a candlewick, just a reminder of the flame.

He pushes his thumb against the point. It hurts more than he expects and he pulls it away by reflex; then, in a moment of ruffled dignity, hopes it's drawn blood just so he didn't look squeamish. The pain lingers just long enough for him to realize that it's unnatural. But he _is_ bleeding. Not pain without blood, at least. It beads on his skin with a thick drop, then rolls and plummets, scoring him with its bright track.

Aenora watches him with neither pity nor judgment. His hand is streaked with blood now and he resists the reflex to wipe it away.

* * *

The sting of the cut has taken him out of his answer. When it subsides, Madoc finds himself distracted, differently, by the smell of his own blood. He cannot but react to the smell of spilt blood from another's vein: it's as tempting as it is galvanizing. It incites his rage or his lust or excitement. He's never alive in the way he is when blood is shed, nor as devouringly hungry.

But his nature has given him a different reaction to his own. It's hard to say what it is. A thrill also: a cold thrill. If the wounded and frightened make something within him glow like a red giant star--then harm to himself plunges him into some kind of cool and thorough darkness. An icy and intimate clarity.

"A red giant star?" Eva questioned him when he gave an answer something like this when she asked.

She was interested in hearing of his bloodlust, which was uncommon in his life. Not even others of the Folk wanted to hear of his obscene ways. Not proud Dain Greenbriar, nor his brother Balekin: though they spilt more blood themselves than they could have possibly ever drunk.

Eva's interest was on a different point this time, though. "I didn't know you had a familiarity with astronomy. I mean, you've made reference to a few points of our world before, but it's an unusual thing to hear from you."

She sat with her legs folded on her bed; he sat, as a gentleman, in a chair pulled politely back from her. Her chairs were a bit small for his comfort, but she seemed to find it endearing.

Madoc contemplated his answer. Eva did have a point, as she tended to, and it meant unraveling something he'd never really had to think about before--why some things were real to him and others weren't, why some had caught his attention and others didn't seem worth his time. More than that, why this was true of _Elfhame_ more broadly. "It's impossible for our worlds to be wholly separate. You see me here talking to you. You see that our forms are made alike, and matching, and that there is nothing stopping me taking you to wife."

"There's a significant thing stopping you from doing that." Eva was teasing, but not joking.

"Yes, I know. You. I just mean that we aren't truly alien to one another; you're a woman and I'm a man. We're more alike than we are unalike."

"Just alike enough for disappointments," said Eva. "For broken hearts and promises. Have you ever heard of a sparrow breaking the heart of a humpback whale? Or a skyscraper betraying a galaxy? We have to be alike, for you to trick and ruin us."

There was a pensive cut to her tone of voice; and, strangely, a fearful one. Not an excitable, heart-racing fear, but something more guarded and shy. She'd been entertaining Madoc's courtship for weeks now and he had started to realize that the directness of his ways had brought out a directness in hers, and that she was afraid of it: afraid of it usually after it had already come out. She was bold in the moment; after, though, she sometimes looked like she'd spit out a frog or a curse. In horror of her own tongue.

Madoc wished she could see that she was incapable of horror. From her mouth or at her hand. But even he knew she'd balk at tenderness, if it were crude. So he just answered to her point: "Do mortals not betray one another in love, then? Are most of your great tragedies on the subject of the Other Lands?"

She couldn't argue with that, so she made a face he found cute--and attractive, but that was always true--that signified, _well, I can't argue with that._

In an odd way he was content to sit here, in his slightly undersized chair. He was always taking her out on outings to woo her: out on a ragwort steed for the first time, to spin circles above and below the Northern Lights and see the glitter of ice on the sea. _It's in a process of melting_ , said Madoc then. _From here you can see that every year there's less and less of it--_ only to be shocked that this brought her to strange tears. But she assured him, _no, it's beautiful. Let me see again._ \--All this and more, he had the power to show her, and he intended to. So it mattered little, surely, if he set courting her properly aside for one day. Let Eva explain to him the significance of the posters on her walls, and the contents of her books.

But she turned to him on a fierce impulse. "I want to see you in battle," she said. "You tell me that you're a warrior. I believe you--you can't lie, after all. But I want to see it. If you're courting me, then I ought to see who you are with my own two eyes."

"You would see me kill," said Madoc, quietly. "There's no other ending to that. That's the difference between battle and sport."

Eva didn't flinch. "Then I would see you kill. You're a killer. Isn't that what you are?"

"Yes. War is my pride and my purpose. But I am wary of showing it to you. I fear that everything I say in theory would be abhorrent to you when you witnessed it. You're no killer."

"You don't know that."

"I do," said Madoc. "I know who you are. Your soul was a lure to my soul. But in this way they don't share a likeness."

Eva regarded him deliberately without disgust or judgment; and yet in the same moment, it felt like she was staring him down. "Then you must show yours to me," she said. "Otherwise I'll only find out eventually, and it will abhor me then. And what would we do? Let's find out now or find out never. I want to see."

* * *

He found himself two opponents who were of the Folk, because it was a very rare human who could pose him a fair challenge. He found them in the ripped seams of the mortal world: for those were _his_ conditions to Eva, that he would not spirit her away to Elfhame until she agreed to be his. And the two he found were redcaps with torn and dilapidated trophies: _old blood_ was a derogatory phrase they'd call exiles like this, men who'd not made an honorable kill in so long a time that their caps were filthy, rather than terrifying. Just a step up from _beastblood_ , who feigned honor with the blood of deer and dogs. But these two were honorable men. Just strung-out and defeated.

Why did Grand General Madoc want to fight them, they wanted to know, cynical and wary. What could he possibly want with the glory they didn't have to give?

"I'm here to confirm to my lady that I am a soldier and a killer, and show her how this is done," said Madoc quite straightforwardly. "You will show respect to her. I am courting her and she is unfamiliar with our ways."

They found this reasonable enough, although curious. But one wanted to know: what would we get out of such an arrangement?

"Freedom from this state you're in. An honorable end to your torment--one way," Madoc flicked Nightfell in a minute gesture, "or the other."

It was an offer they would and could never decline from him. Not ever, and more than anything not now. Not here in this cold warehouse where they passed their final, brokenhearted days, with a mortal woman in a winter coat peering owlishly at them behind the thick ruff of her hood.

As a result, they fought ferociously. Nothing else would have satisfied the bargain. He did them the honor of not playing with them; they occupied him for enough time to be seen, and then he cut them down, one then the other before he could register the first.

Their throats sprayed blood and Madoc painted his cap with it. It wasn't all that came away bloodied. He wrapped it around his arm again and glanced at Eva.

She was looking back at him with the same wide-eyed, watchful expression. She'd only moved back a little, when the blood had spattered. When he met her eyes, she said, "Can I see?"

She meant the cap. He came over to her and, to his bemusement, she put her hand out--took her glove off, put her hand out, and placed it on the bloody fabric.

This was traditionally very rude, and in this context, very sweet. Madoc was filled abruptly and uncomfortably with something he wasn't accustomed to: understanding. Her hand came away red and she looked at it in childlike fascination; and then she started to cry.

It was the first time she let him--smeared with blood--put his arms around her. There was no desire in it, just sympathy: just the thing that came from the uncomfortable cold center of the chest that said, _stop crying, don't cry. I don't want you to cry._ In the process, it also got blood all over her coat. He carried her home, a less usual way. This situation seemed like it would provoke questions.

* * *

Madoc waited while she showered, and was surprised when she offered her shower to him afterward: he declined, but did wash up in the basin to the best of his ability. "I prefer a tub," he said. "I have one at my estate. It's lovely and of significant size. At least four people could fit in it, although I haven't tested that, as that's not really the life that I live. The tap has its own sorts of bubble functions, but it always drains perfectly."

"Yes, thank you for the advertisement. You can use my tub, too, if you want."

"I don't think I'd fit comfortably in your tub," said Madoc candidly. "I assumed it was made for women."

Eva sniffled but also snorted. After she finished wringing out her hair she invited him to sit on her bed, which also was not a flirtatiously charged invitation in the slightest, although he couldn't help but be a little pleased with the progress; she was going to send him away for the night soon, she was candid, but she thanked him. He wasn't sure for what, so she elaborated--"for your honesty. For your patience. And for doing that crazy insane thing just to impress me. I don't know what to say about that."

Nor did he. But he sat on his side of the bedspread, wondering about the pattern on the duvet.

"Do you have any horrible secrets?" she said. "I may as well know now. Or planned infidelities? Would you play me, or some other love, false with your fifteen others? Do you intend to hurt me?"

"I don't know what you would consider a horrible secret. I don't think so. --I have never been monogamous. I'd swear to it for you, and keep it, if you wished. I have a lover now, a human man in Elfhame. It's something I'm accustomed to." Madoc hesitated on the last, which disturbed him the most. "... I do not have any intention to hurt you. I'm attempting to court you. The way I imagine marriage or partnership doesn't seem like it would be much different from yours. I don't know if that's really true. But you should hear it from my mouth."

"I guess no one intends to hurt anyone," said Eva.

Madoc did not think that was true, and said so.

When he was pulling his boots back on, preparing to make his way out and back to his own country and his home, she stayed his departure for one more point. "Are you familiar with the ballad Tam Lin? It's a Scottish story that involves a man becoming involved with a faerie queen at a certain point."

"Possibly," he hazarded, because _possibly_ was true. It was the sort of thing his young self would've scorned as sort of an immature, intemperate philosophy, but it did take encountering something to scorn it.

"A young human girl steals back the man she loves from the Queen of Faerie. Or wins, I suppose. I'm not addressing the plausibility of that--there's just a part at the end I remember where the queen tells Tam Lin, the man, that had she known yesterday that he would leave her, she would have put out his eyes and his heart and replaced them with stone. --I always remembered that."

Madoc raked his memory again; but to him so many ballads of love sounded like this. With mortals and faeries together, or without. There were few great bards of sensible thinking. "Is that because that disturbs you?" he asked, glancing up at her from his kneeling.

"No. It's because I always felt like I could relate. To the queen, I mean. I thought there was always a part of me that--" Eva shook her head, like that would dislodge the malformed thought. She wheeled like a struck bird: "Would you? Are you someone who'd rather destroy something than lose it? If it was your love? If it was anything?"

"Destruction is the only way I lose anything, Eva. I have never lost. So you see me standing here today." Madoc stood, to make a truth of this figurative statement, and regarded her intently. "I always prevail."

"Everyone loses eventually," said Eva, in the sort of frustrating statement that mathematical odds made difficult to argue.

Before he left she leaned up and kissed him. He didn't hold it any longer than it was offered; but he reached up with the point of his thumb and tucked her hair behind her ear, tracing her skin to feel the shiver through her neck.

* * *

"And your human girl?" This was the sort of question Justin asked when his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. In his forge on Madoc's property, outside in some labor, or in Madoc's bed, where he would sleep for a long time after Madoc had risen. He wasn't shy about that. _Try being less virile_ was his quip on that subject, except that Madoc was pretty sure he also just liked Madoc's bed itself. It was sprawling, cupped in the woodwork of its headboard, and Justin found it easy to fall asleep there. He seemed to think that Madoc didn't appreciate it enough.

Sometimes Madoc did watch Justin sleep, though he preferred to watch him awake. Sleeping, he was beautiful and well-formed like a statue; waking, he was in motion and one was reminded that he was not art, not the product of a chisel, and that the lines of his body served not the eye of the beholder, but his own youthful power. That was much more like the Justin Duarte that had captured Madoc's fascination.

Lolling about on Madoc's mattress like this, though, Justin was probably somewhere in between these two things. Madoc smiled, fond, from the chair at his escritoire. "Eva," he corrected Justin, not for the first time. "And she isn't 'my' human girl. Not yet, anyway. --I think she's doing well. But she has a brother--her brother is ill, perhaps terminally. I dread her sorrow if he dies."

"You dread it?" The occasional rudeness of Justin's curiosity reminded Madoc of a faerie. One saw this with mortals who grew up too much among the Folk of the Air: the shimmer of the inhuman across their reasoning. On Justin it was incongruous and sweet. It didn't match with the rest of his disposition. "What do you dread?"

"I don't know how to console that kind of grief. Most kinds of grief." This had become awkward, suddenly, with Madoc's hand halfway across his escritoire for his pen for an unrelated matter. Awkwardness like this happened more and unexpectedly the more time he spent with Justin and Eva. Just a consequence of intimacy. He'd thought he'd had intimacy before; it turned out that, previously, he'd had lovers, and it was no guarantee of preparation. "What I mean is... yes, the Folk mourn. I think the warlike Folk do less of it, because we see it as a dishonor to death. We _grieve_. It's impossible not to grieve--that's out of our hands. But... sickness and age are frightening to most of us. We're cowards on the subject. --I'd have to think of what Eva would want from me."

Justin sat up and pushed his hair out of his face; Madoc got up, pulled by courtesy and temptation to help him braid it. Justin let him, thinking over his reply: "Well, if it's frightening to _you_ all, imagine how we feel about it. Death. Just being on the verge of melting into a puddle all the time."

"I know that you think that--" Madoc was careful with the strands of Justin's hair and his comb. Madoc himself hadn't had long hair in a century--grew it out in a golden curtain like a boastful prince, and then sheared it off once and kept it shorn, maybe lazy of caring for it, maybe more confident in his looks. But he did recall how. "But you underestimate our talent for irrational fear."

"That's a good point," said Justin, entirely too comfortably. "I'm too accustomed to dealing with you. And with weaker solutions of you--others who buy what I make. Valiant and reckless men."

"Which of those two words do you really mean, Justin?"

"For them? Neither. Many a coward is willing to pay for a fearsome toy. I'm not Grimsen; I'm willing to make a glorified toy, if the patron can offer me something I need." Justin angled his head in a way that looked quizzical, but it was also to give Madoc access to a section of his hair. Madoc wondered, not for the first time, who else he went to bed with. Not many, nowadays. It was just a matter of convenience; he could do his business more lucratively if he passed most of his time near this estate. Maybe that was the real privilege of patronage Madoc paid for: time. The one thing no mortal or immortal could endlessly divide.

"--For you, both, of course. Who else would I be talking about?"

Justin's voice was deceptively mellow, which rested over a well of tension. Madoc knew why: it was impossible not to be a little tense when someone else had a handful of your hair. Too easy to pull too hard; so easy to grip too tightly. You will learn that I don't, he was thinking to himself, in his imagination to Justin--you will see that I wouldn't. You'll come to sleep easily with me.

* * *

Winter breaking to spring was a restless time for the Folk. Mortals visiting Elfhame's halls would call it the Summer Country or the Summerlands, but that wasn't true, only reflective of the haziness of time there. They spent their time caught in a web of glamour or sleeping a sleep suspended from life, and everything they remembered was languid. Not that time _wasn't_ languid in Insmire, or stretched to a break in Insweal. But of course they had had seasons. How else could they celebrate the passage of time? Faeries loved holidays, anniversaries, solstices and equinoxes. A victory was not so beloved as a centennial of a victory. A May Queen couldn't be picked without May. They loved to see green leaves go red. The Folk of the Air loved death, as long as it wasn't their own.

Many felt the same of births, surprisingly. Madoc couldn't relate. Ever since falling in love with Eva he'd entertained a fancy of her bearing his child, though he'd no way to know that she could or would. She'd never expressed an interest in being a mother, which made this generally quixotic, but he had no shame in dreaming. Few Folk did. It always surprised him that humanity was so universally plagued with shame over its own cravings, so tremendously that there was a common story for the origin _of_ shame. And Eva was named for it.

Still, even before Eva... he'd never aspired to sire a child, but he sometimes imagined having one. A family, faceless, to run about in and scuff their knees in his home. He couldn't explain the craving. He didn't seem to have a name for it.

 _You really don't have a name for that emotion,_ said Justin Duarte when told this some months ago. The tone he'd taken was dry, but Madoc had been aware he was being tender. Trying to make a point.

All through Insmire ground was breaking and green was cracking up through barren ground. This had some connection to Eldred Greenbriar's mood, Madoc was vaguely aware, in the way that the tides did to the moon. Eldred was much older than Madoc and seemed, even to him, something of a cold and colorless institution.

They were to ride to the palace that morning to present themselves to the dawning of Eldred's spring court. Rather, Madoc was and Justin had decided to do business of his own there too. Madoc's curiosity shone a little brighter than usual, or maybe it was just that he had someone to talk to, for he said, "Do you think Val Moren could tell the story of the Greenbriars and Elfhame, in full? Do you think there's anyone who knows it better than he does?"

"Well, the king, I assume." Justin's answer was thrown off like a shrug, and Madoc waited for him to pause to reconsider. That was something he'd learned about Justin: he didn't actually like to settle for glibness in what he left behind him in the world. He tended to circle back. "No, I suppose I don't assume. I don't know. It seems likely. But he is mad, isn't he?"

"Yes. Though there is a wild serenity in it. His memory has never been in disorder--only his thoughts."

Val Moren was the first mortal Madoc, a boy at the Greenbriar court, had ever seen, and he was distractingly lovely; unlike Justin or Eva, he seemed very frail. He was older than Madoc as well, by years and numbers he didn't fully appreciate. But it was not hard to remember that he was just a pretty young man when Eldred Greenbriar had carried him away. You could see that entombed somewhere in him.

"He finds me uneasy," said Justin, dismissive. "I'm sure it isn't personal. I don't think he likes the sight of a changeling with any childhood in Elfhame. He hates and loves Elfhame in his own way--I think he thinks I'm incapable of appreciating. Perhaps he's not wrong. It doesn't matter."

"You're jealous," said Madoc with low amusement.

Justin did startle at that, that little guilty flicker of the eyes he had because, however human his blood, he was a terrible liar. "Of Val Moren? I don't covet his life."

"I said jealous. You think I find him beautiful. He _is_ beautiful. But you are you."

Justin stared at him. He was strong, for a mortal man, but Madoc never found him difficult to pin and overpower in sport; times like this just made it a tempting prospect. He demurred and just stood in his way instead, sort of a gentlemanly equivalent. Justin, always good at ignoring, ignored this too; Madoc tilted his head, curious in a searching way, and said, "Are you jealous on the matter of Eva, too?"

"Of course I'm jealous." Justin was brusque.

Madoc brought his thumb up to the line of Justin's jaw. It was a gentle and possessive gesture he did not mean to come off like he was calming a horse. Justin gave him a look that suggested it had, but also brought his own hand up to clasp Madoc's reluctantly.

"Tie your horse up again. Ride behind me on mine to the palace," Madoc said.

"I'm going to conduct my own business as a craftsman. I'd rather not present myself as your plaything."

"And yet you're coming on this day to take advantage of my protection. --That isn't an insult. Come with me and you can talk business and no one will dare speak ill of you. Likely they either assume it, anyway, or they won't remember."

* * *

"But you did get a child on Eva," says Aenora, as the blood stains his hand in rivulets.

"Yes."

"Not Taryn or Jude."

"No."

The fire in Aenora's hearth is red-orange, white, blue, and dancing. Madoc can watch it without discomfort. His pupils will narrow, near-shut, and protect him from the light.

"This story is about Jude," Aenora says, as though it needs saying. "And yet you've yet to speak her name. I think I understand, but... was there a moment at all in the room where you killed Justin and Eva that you considered not recognizing Taryn and Jude as your daughters?"

She is spinning, now, but the fibers she is working with are wicking his blood from the floor. There's more of it than he imagined: fiber and blood both.

"Of course not," he answers. "If two of us abandoned our responsibilities, that should not be any excuse for the third."

"And yet I do not believe that was your reason."

The fire leaves an afterimage with him when he looks away, and the rest of the house is darker, only filling in its detail as his eyes adjust again.

He looks up at Aenora. "Are you not afraid of angering me?"

"I am not. I imagine it's inevitable. But it poses no danger to me: there's something you burn for much more than you could ever fleetingly want to hurt me. That's why you're sitting here," says Aenora. "Where else is all that blood coming from?"

* * *

Madoc traveled to Eldred's court with Justin holding tightly to him for purchase. His horse was caparisoned with his arms and shod for war. Those they rode past--burghers and maids, faerie and mortal--flinched and withdrew at the sight of him. That meant he looked as he should, presenting himself to the king in a new season. He was always to be fearsome, even if today he had no reason to believe this was a day of fear.

And yet once they arrived with fanfare and Justin vanished on his own business, Madoc found himself kneeling to the king in his throne room under the hill. Eldred was in some mood strange and foul and had ordered everyone else out so he could speak to his Grand General: which meant he had something that disgusted him on his mind. Madoc, presumably, could not be disgusted; or if he could, he hardly expressed it to Eldred Greenbriar, whose ring he had once knelt to kiss.

He was surprised, but not uneasy, at least not yet. He did not expect to be disgusted by any agenda out of the heart of King Eldred. It wasn't that he was surpassingly kind, but weary and cautious of war.

More strange was the chamber, so vast and empty and cold. The roots of a great tree grew all around them. Were all Greenbriars so fond of the dark and damp? Or was this just Eldred's peculiar way? Ancient and peculiar, now.

However, Eldred _did_ surprise him. "I fear I've no matters of state for you today. I have called you for the errand of a thug or a spy or a babysitter or an assassin, Madoc," he said bluntly. "But I believe you would handle it better."

His mistress had vanished along with something incriminating. Her name was Liriope; if she was a traitor to Elfhame, said Eldred bluntly, he wanted Madoc to kill her. If she was not, he was to bring her back with him. Absolute secrecy was not important; what was important was judgment. This was to happen now. Did he understand?

"I've brought a friend along with me," Madoc said. "I will have to tell him first so that I don't abandon him without a word. Or if you will, and host him here under the privilege of guestright, I will take him back when I return. His name is Justin Duarte. Will you do that, sir?"

When he secured this, he went first to Liriope's empty rooms high in the hill. It seemed silly to gallivant about without this first step. Near-empty too, as it so happened: here he found a slight, jittery girl, sort of beautiful like a bud only a little uncurled and wide-eyed in a way that made a charming picture with Liriope's bed. This was not Liriope, but another mistress of the king: Oriana, probably. She had a defensive, protective look already, a caught-in-the-act look as he blocked the doorway.

"This is Liriope's room," Madoc said in lieu of a greeting. "Thus I didn't come here with the intention of menacing you in particular. Nor do I really care what you're doing here. The king wants me to find her. Do you know where she is?"

"No. I am not stealing from Liriope or spying on her. I want to find her also."

Madoc looked to the shattered window: "Is that why you don't think she's with Dain? That he would have no reason to use force with her?"

Oriana seemed to think he was an idiot for this question. "The king knows about Dain. That can't have anything to do with it."

And yet Madoc wasn't so sure--for Eldred kept a menagerie of beautiful things for his pleasure, Val Moren his most beloved and most heartbroken, Oriana his youngest. If someone wanted to abduct one of his kept lovers, they'd have an embarrassment of choice, really. Liriope was only laughing and pretty; her only point of distinction was that the king's own son, Prince Dain himself, shared her bed when it pleased him. One of those little grotesqueries of royalty. Maybe that was nothing to Oriana, who knew Liriope, but to the court Liriope was just the concubine of father and son. That was the sort of distinguishing mark one came away with from the seraglio of a faerie king.

"Does Dain have any personal enemies?" said Madoc aloud. He was in fact starting to wonder why Eldred hadn't asked a thug, babysitter, assassin, but most specifically spy. But he suspected Eldred couldn't imagine Madoc awkwardly cowed by anyone important yelling at him. In this he had a failure of imagination, but it was true Madoc's measure of importance differed.

Oriana frowned. "Who would be Prince Dain's enemy?"

Madoc put his hand to the broken glass. "Well, I don't especially care for him."

Oriana was boring a hole into the back of his head so much with her silence that he had to do the decent thing and glance back at her, where she found she was quite appalled. And, in fact, relieved, as her shoulders sank. ".... I mean, nor do I. But you and I are unfriendly people, anyway, and I meant 'be his enemy.'"

"You hardly know me, miss."

"You are Grand General Madoc." She left it at that. "Prince Dain's enemies are all his family, General. It's everyone else that he's terribly popular with."

This was true of princes of Elfhame: they had a great deal more family than most to go to war with. In the iron kingdoms, they had a long history of making and marrying new relatives and then immediately loathing them. They birthed and died furiously. They naturally hated their brothers: how could they not, when there was only so much land? Not so in Elfhame, where families were sparse and drifting. The Greenbriars were exotic there. They all associated to the point of contempt.

Madoc left Oriana behind, though she wanted to go with him. "I don't want you to bring Liriope to any harm," she said plainly. "He wouldn't have sent you if he didn't think there was at least a chance of it."

He didn't think it was a large chance, but also could not contradict her. He bid her goodbye in Liriope's room, surrendering it as he surmised she was not going to leave him alone with it.

He went to Hollow Hall.

* * *

Aenora's fingers are dabbed, on each fingertip, with red now. "Is it true you murdered Prince Dain with your own hand?"

"I was his killer," says Madoc. "I ran him through."

"Do you not believe it a murder?"

Madoc thinks he has never bled this much. Or maybe he's never had so much reason to attend to it, rather than bundle it away in a dressing until it ceased. Maybe he's poured out this much of himself before into cotton wadding. "It was a contest for a throne. We both desired the same thing. He'd killed for it before. He just didn't consider me capable."

"And Prince Balekin?"

"Worse. I am proud of my daughter for his death. It was long overdue."

"You would have had him as your king."

Madoc bared his teeth in some form. "Well, someone's got to be."

* * *

Hollow Hall was a gruesome place, staffed with mortal women and men with eyes dull with annihilation. Madoc dismounted there and, very shortly, found Liriope in Balekin's hedge maze. Her wrists were punctured by thorns where he'd restrained her, but her gown was close to spotless. She didn't look otherwise harmed. Her expression was glassy and exhausted, but she brightened to see him: possibly the most happy she'd ever looked at the sight of Grand General Madoc. "How did you find your way to me?" she asked.

He realized she meant the maze. "The smell of your blood," he answered, factual and distant.

Liriope recoiled, but just briefly. Then she got over it, as he freed her and she rubbed her wrists; he'd held out his own hands so he could inspect the little wounds when she said, "I'm glad the king sent you first. Balekin wants Dain to come looking. He wants to provoke him with the sight. You know it's his great pleasure to see Dain furious."

"I'm sure that he'll receive some other opportunity." Madoc wasn't sure what struck him as so dreary and prosaic about this situation. He was rescuing a woman from the clutches of a sadistic blackguard; it really ought to be glamorous, at least in the telling. He found it impossible to imagine. "Can you stand? --Yes. You are otherwise unharmed?"

A nod. "Balekin doesn't desire or hate me. It's only Dain he is interested in."

Madoc doubted it, on either count--but perhaps that was some uncommon protection for Liriope here. He kept this to himself and they came almost all the way out of the maze before he heard Balekin Greenbriar, and to the threshold before they encountered him.

Balekin was a quarter undressed, loose and shaggy-haired in shirtsleeves. He was also probably about a quarter drunk. "You? I never took _you_ for gallant, you old beast."

Madoc was weary. Somewhere down deeper within his bones than iron could reach. It tempted him not to be ruder, but to leave without saying anything. He was aware that might be complicating, however, so he said, "Your father is going to be displeased to hear of this. I take it this display isn't for him, but he's the only one who's going to see it."

" _I_ don't see why I should let you leave."

"With all of the respect that I happen to hold for you and your station, my lord, I can't imagine how you would prevent me."

Liriope was quiet, unusually so for her. Well, it was gaiety she was known for; fear and humiliation were less effervescent. Perhaps she felt she had nothing to contribute, and perhaps she was right.

"You must know that I could make your life more difficult, General," said Balekin pleasantly.

"You must know that I could make your life shorter."

Balekin had an unpleasant laugh, no pleasanter for being forced. The one he gave was harsh and phony, a drunk man's exceptionally unconvincing mirth: trying to back down without backing down. "Well--I suppose you _are_ a monster on a very long chain. I shouldn't deny my upright kinsmen their few pleasures. Especially when they're clearly denying you yours." He stood aside, but only halfway, one step; he smiled more unpleasantly, and said, "You may go and take her to my father. But I will withhold one point of retribution."

"You are free to call upon me and enact it at your leisure, my lord. Liriope, let's go."

Liriope took his arm: fearful and cozying to his favor, or seeking comfort? She was fearful either way leaving Hollow Hall. He couldn't say how much of that was of Balekin and how much of himself, only feel her shaking breath as they walked. The pearlescent gown she wore had become just a little grimy at the hem.

Liriope was considered an uncommon beauty. Madoc was not an expert on what was common or uncommon, but he supposed she seemed nice. He was startled when, before he swept her up onto his horse, she smiled at him. "Thank you," she said.

He knew not what to say to that--from Liriope, here, now--so he said nothing.

"Do you know your hair has the same color as mine?" Her voice had more brightness in it now. "I mean it's the same hue. I doubt we've any relation in common, but do you see that it is exactly the same? Funny that we look a bit alike."

He was caught completely off his guard, for no one had ever said it or anything like it. Liriope was a beauty. And yet as she named it, he knew she had to be right: about the hue, her long straw-blonde hair like a mortal girl's. He reached out without thinking to take a section of it in his hand and heard her breath hitch again. "You are right," he said and let it drop. He did not smile back.

* * *

"And now her son is your son."

"I never touched Liriope," says Madoc, though he is no longer sure to whom. "I never harmed her, either. Oak is not my son by blood. And his mother's death was not my doing."

Aenora is spinning a vivid thread. Unlike his cap, it does not darken in the air: no, it's bright, like it alone has just unraveled from under his skin. She says pitying: "Why is that important to you for me to know?"

* * *

Madoc found Oriana again sitting on a low-lying palace fountain. She was alone again--it seemed typical of her--but in public, so she didn't startle, just looked warily at him. "Is she safe?" she asked.

"She is with the king," said Madoc, in the only form of the answer he could give.

* * *

He looked for Eva just before dusk, just before the bitter cold in the day plummeted to deadly. The seasons were even nowhere, but they were most fickle where Eva lived. Here they called this month the _dead_ of winter, but in fact it was about to surge out of its grave, much faster than it sank in. Spring up again like John Barleycorn. Some places had faerie winters like that, just for a week.

He'd dressed for the day, but not the night. His errands had delayed him. Time always slipped out of his grasp when his mind was wandering. At least the cold and Eva pinned it back to one place.

He had chill metal in his pocket, a chain and a pendant, which he thumbed over again and again while he waited for her.

Eva was not at her house. No one was. He went to a telephone booth to try the office where she worked, but it was too late and it was closed; he leaned against the booth and tried to think of where else she could be.

It occurred to him that she had family. Everyone did, in the barest sense, or did at some point--but Eva _had_ family, sort of, although they didn't get on well. Family to die and mourn. Family to grieve: and to grieve _with_.

Madoc broke into her home without much effort--it would be more accurate to say that he came in while it was empty. He wrenched open a downstairs window with such nonchalant expedience that, as he predicted, no one cared, and then he stepped inside. Eva's house without Eva was a gloomy, frail place, but he was only there to look for evidence of telephone numbers and addresses.

And so it was that he presented himself at the Nowak family's house in the suburbs, in Evanston, where they lived and Eva had grown up, and where they were mourning her brother Luke. It was her mother, red around the eyes and dully surprised, who answered the door: "I am looking for Eva," he told her. "I am her suitor. I'm here to give my condolences and speak with her, if I may."

He saw the flicker in her eyes--worse, to more suspicion--when he mentioned Eva's name, and knew then he cared nothing for their permission. But he had his manners.

Eva came out into the cold on the stoop underdressed, tired and teary herself, or something after teary. All her weeping had drained away and just left its tracks on her. Madoc immediately shrugged off his coat to put it on her--"Well, I don't want _you_ to die," said Eva, genuinely alarmed.

He smiled. "I'm not going to die."

They found a neighbor's porch, unused and snowy, and Eva sat with her legs across Madoc's and her head on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he said, and then was bewildered that it came from him unprompted and without thinking long on what it meant.

She didn't say anything, but curled her head in more. He put his hand in her hair and she didn't stop him.

"Have you ever lost someone?" she asked eventually.

"To death? Yes. My mother died in front of me when I was thirteen."

"That sounds like it's more normal where you come from," said Eva with a touch of morbid humor. It was genuine and more like her.

It got another smile out of him, this one into her hair. "Not as normal as you'd think," he said.

They sat there for a while, and eventually he stirred enough to look for the jewelry he'd brought. While he did, he said, "I am curious, and I won't demand that you tell me--but how did you first encounter our Folk? How did you learn of us? And learn how to recognize me?"

Eva didn't move for a bit, enough that her eyes were probably either closed or she was staring into the middle distance, and either way she was composing her thoughts. "My sister slept with one of you," she said eventually. "A man who tricked her and left her alone. She's okay now, I guess, except... except that I think she's lost her ability to love anyone else. I think she gave that away. And he didn't love her but he took it with him anyway. I didn't know anyone had that power."

"Which power?"

"To keep someone's love forever," she said, "whether they like it or not."

Madoc said nothing to that, because he was afraid to say the only true thing that he could say. So that subject glimmered and vanished, with something else to chase it, and he withdrew his hand with the necklace inside.

"I will love you until time annihilates all trace or memory of each of our brief lives," he said. "I will give you my life in whatever way you ask it of me now. That's our way. Your people will be my people. That's yours, isn't it? --Marry me. Be my wife. Come home with me. I cannot promise you eternity because I do not possess it. But I promise that my world will be your world for as long as you desire."

She blinked up at him with wide, hopeful eyes--with that look again that he remembered, in a different shade, that she wanted to trust him to be real. He held the necklace up to her neck. "What is that?" she said of it. "Is that faerie gold? Does it have some effect?"

"Hm? --Oh, no, I bought it from a jeweler downtown. I thought you would like that. Do you not like that?"

Eva's tears weren't completely spent: she wept again and clutched his sleeve with one hand, and turned her head so he could clasp the chain around her throat. "I do like it," she managed. "--I hope you didn't cheat them for it."

"I certainly did not. Bought and paid for."

"Will I be able to go home?"

"As often as you'd like," said Madoc, "as long as you come back home to me."

Eva kissed him, longer this time, and if it weren't cold and they weren't outside he might have pulled her all the way onto his lap; when she broke away she said, "I will. I do. ... Are you going to take me away on a horse now?"

He swept her up and stood with her in his arms. She was still dressed for the indoors and bundled up in his coat, now with his necklace and his diamond ring at her throat. "No. It's winter and the creatures of the Air are dormant where they grow. But there are other ways and I will take you there."

He carried his bride to the frozen water, beneath which the Below opens for the Unseelie just as the Air spirits them on its shoulders wherever they choose to go. No unforgiving winter wind for Eva on this day: they went through another way. They fell.

When he took Eva to his bedchamber, she said: "You must never deceive me."

"I will never deceive you," he said, and knelt to take off her shoes for her.

"You must always love me," she said, eyes strange and shy.

"I will always love you. May my heart be rent in two on the day that I betray you, Eva." Her shoes had just one buckle each on them and they came off, leaving her translucent stockings, eliciting a shiver from her when he touched the arch of her foot. And from him, he realized. His hand was shaking. "Let me be yours, Eva. Let me in. With me you will be warm."

**Author's Note:**

> Happy incredibly overdue Yuletide, Phlyarologist! :) I saw your letter in November or so, right around the time that I finished the Folk of the Air books and was absolutely reeling with emotions about Jude's terrible faerie dad, and your Madoc prompts were absolutely amazing. I was hoping to get this finished before December 25th. That did not happen. Instead, it ballooned.
> 
> This is a 2-chapter story, so I'll update it with its second half in a few days, and update this note accordingly. It's in response to a few of my favorite prompts you listed:  
>  _\- I would just really, really like any kind of introspective character study for this guy. It's unambiguous throughout the series that the fae do have feelings, but it's also clear they are not quite the same as those of humans, or their subjective experience of them is different. I can't see Madoc experiencing actual remorse for anything he's done, but I do wonder what he thinks about it all. He's able to channel his bloodthirst strategically and delay gratification, so it's not like he's a frenzied beast, but bloodshed is nonetheless something that he needs – what's that feel like?_  
>  \- _/Eva: I am so extremely curious about Eva, and Madoc's relationship with her. How did she catch his eye? How completely terrifying were they together?_  
>  \- _AU where, at any point in the story, Madoc kills Jude!_
> 
> And so this was born. Thanks for the inspiration. :)


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